


break

by eichart



Series: the uncertainty of lost hope  ('17-'18 season) [2]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 07:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16384070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eichart/pseuds/eichart
Summary: Even the best things break under pressure.





	break

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very very very late piece that belongs with my series for the 17-18 season to fill in the time gap for November and December. It gets a little emotional at times (which... I hope would be a given with my work) but I hope you enjoy!

_ truth is like blood underneath your fingernails _

_ and you don’t wanna hurt yourself / by looking too closely _

* * *

 

November is the worst month of the year with the last of the colors falling from trees and snow falling like some twisted promise of winter; just a reminder to the city that it’s not ready for the dark depressing months. Not that they or Jack need more reasons for things to be darker still.

The days grow ever shorter and he notices Sam’s distance and takes it as a meaning to back off—to focus on the dismal hockey the team is putting out for show. But the team isn’t playing up to a fraction of its potential, a broken product that just refuses to add up to the sum of its parts no matter how many times they’re taken apart and forced back together. And Sam— Jack can see it when he looks at him, that there’s something broken inside of him like there’s something broken inside this team and Jack just wants to fucking fix it but he doesn’t know how.

He doesn’t fucking know how.

He knows that he’s supposed to know how. That the moment he tugged down that blue and gold jersey over his head, he was supposed to have something special to fix this broken, whimpering thing called a team.

Some days it feels manageable. Something clicks like good passes sent tape to tape and sounds something like hope. Most days though, it’s oppressing, bright like the lights had been in his eyes on the draft stage in Sunrise, heavy like the thousands of eyes set on him.

You’re not supposed to learn how to lose, but some days to Jack it feels exactly like that.

You can’t blame him for wanting, every now and then. To have fun and  _ dream  _ of bright things again. Evander’s pretty good at that --expensive drinks and pretty gold things.

He feels bad, tries to urge Sam into coming with but ends up leaving him on the couch or at Ryan’s door all the same.

Some days, you have to take care of yourself first.

...

They lose. Again. Another blowout loss to an already blown out season.

The locker room feels as stifled as it has since the third week of October, increasingly uncomfortable silences that break into echoing empty words and unfulfilled promises. Jack says his piece but no matter the weight put on the words, they feel muffled, sluggish in some unseen haze in the air.

He drops his head into his hands and tells himself how to breathe again. When Jack lifts his head again, Sam isn’t anywhere to be seen.

Jack finds him in the back halls, sitting with his back to the wall, knees up against his chest and arms folded over them. He shouldn’t be able to tell with Sam’s face buried in his arms but the truth is too much time has passed --they’ve been through too  _ many _ things-- for Jack to not recognize the curve of a back, the aura of lostness.

“Hey—“ Jack says softly, kneeling before him, one hand outstretched toward Sam’s shoulder.

Fingertips just barely brush the fabric of Sam’s shirt when Sam flinches, head jerking up as if he’d been burned. “ _ Don’t”  _ It sounds something like a warning, anger hardening the word in the gloomy hall.

“—Samson.”

“Jack, just —just  _ don’t.”  _ Jack can see Sam’s eyes, the way something’s broken in them behind the frustration and anger. Something guarded in them when they’ve never been anything but open to him.

Jack swallows and retracts his hand, uncertain what to do. Sam moves to stand before he can decide anyway. “I just— I can’t do this right now.”

Jack watches him go with silent eyes and a choked throat, just another broken piece on his broken team he can’t seem to fix. This seems to hurt so much more than anything, though. Because just maybe he never thought he’d lose Sam so easily.

He falls to the place where Sam had been only moments earlier, body bent in a mirror of the same position, knees into chest, arms over knees, and forehead against forearms. His heart thunders in his ears with far too rapid beats, the space in his chest feeling like it’s far too small and constricted. In that moment it’s like he can feel every ton of Keybank Center pushing down on him —Atlas trapped beneath the concrete dome of the world.

“ _ Fuck!” _ It echoes down the empty hallways, doing little to help the situation or alleviate this broken helplessness suffused into his veins.

He smacks his fist into the concrete floor like it’ll make him feel any better.

It doesn’t.

…

Jack’s never known what love feels like but he imagines it feels a lot like this.

Falling in love—

It’d never been part of Jack’s plans. The Dream —playing hockey, living the thrill of skating on NHL ice for a living— that hadn’t had a place for a love other than that for the sport, for camaraderie, for team. And yeah, maybe he’s the type to cry over chick flicks and is too good with kids, but Jack had been okay with that. It’s part of the gig: learning to love the ice before anything.

Playing in the NHL had been a dream —still is— and it was enough.

But Sam...

Sam who smiles at him every morning and hugs him without question after every loss, Sam who grew from this soft-spoken good Canadian boy to Jack’s best friend in the matter of weeks, Sam who looks at him over glasses of beer all soft at the edges, Sam who cellies too close and touches too much and makes Jack’s heart thud against his ribs…

Sam, who couldn’t seem to look him in the eye a few weeks earlier and some days still can’t.

Jack doesn’t realize how much he could miss him until he wasn’t there. Even summer hadn’t seemed this lonely, even on other sides of North America they were on the same wavelength.

But at the end of all this, Sam feels like this is it, and this absence makes Jack feel hollow  ---like maybe signing an eight year contract wouldn’t mean everything unless he had someone to share it with.

…

The house is quiet and stewed in darkness when Jack steps in. Even the TV is dark and quiet. The last time the house had been like this, Jack found Sam half-drunk trying to breathe through a panic attack. Something inside him clenches, the door groaning on its hinges as he pushes it closed.

“Sam?” He leaves his shoes at the door because he was raised right and walks with tentative steps down the hall into the darkened kitchen. “Samson, you home?”

Jack finds his way to the master bedroom, pushes his way in with a gentle touch on the door. Sam sits against the headboard, scrolling through something on his phone with dead looking eyes. Somewhere in his chest, something clenches painfully. His hand clenches in a fist, knuckles still a little bruised from his attempt at going after Ian Cole for bringing Sam to his knees.

It’s that same surge of protectiveness that keeps him in the doorway, words cautiously quiet. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m just tired.”

Jack’s not sure why he thought he would hear anything different, wonders if he should push into the wrongness he hears in Sam’s voice.

He blinks. He doesn’t.

…

Days pass. Jack still spends too much time with Evander, Sam passes out at Ryan’s house more often than Jack would like, and their townhouse on the lake settles quiet and uneasy.

Jack knows they’re supposed to be good now;  _ really  _ good now after that darkened bedroom conversation and the quiet nights that followed. But Jack wakes up in the middle of the night and Sam isn’t there. In the morning, Jack will see him on his way to the kitchen, nestled in the mess of a comforter on his bed he barely slept in last season.

There’s still something between them— or maybe it’s the lack of something between them. It wasn’t so long ago that they were perfectly matched, something like two pieces of a puzzle fitting together, a pair of magnets endlessly circling and creeping ever closer to each other. But there’s  _ something _ now.

The still too-often silences aren’t the contemplative kind, more the terse types that demand something to break it than the easy ones filled with winter fireplace warmth and interlocked fingers.

It’s not easy to fix things— Jack, saddled with too many expectations and pressure to be the cure all, knows this all too well. It’s just, he doesn’t fucking know how to  _ fix this  _ and for the longest time now  _ this _ , him and Sam, has been something he could fall back into, has always been something he thought he knew _. _

It feels like he doesn’t anymore, so he says nothing.

…

Nothing is a heavy word. Sometimes an absence can weigh on you just as heavy as much as any presence.

Nothing is what happens when Phil puts them on a line together. Nothing is what happens when they drive home in the same car and separate headspaces.

_ Nothing _ is what happens when they’re silently eating leftover loser lasagna. They’ve been eating far too much of that lately, but Jake McCabe isn’t one to easily break tradition.

“You okay?” Jack asks tentatively after a long stilted silence broken only by forks  _ clincking  _ on plates.

“Yeah, ‘course,” says Sam.

Jack frowns at Sam who won’t look back at him. He remembers it so clearly, the darkness, the hopelessness. Words… Promises…

_ Do you want this? Do you want to fight for this? _

_ Yes. _

“You just seem kinda quiet,” says Jack, as if their dinners haven’t been quiet since mid-October.

“It’s nothing. Just tired.”

Right now Jack feels it’s almost as stifling here as it is in the locker room and it feels so wrong in this place that they’ve carved out to be theirs; some safe haven from prying eyes and the outside world. Tracking all that in here just ---it isn’t right. It doesn’t settle easy, just like Sam’s tight-lipped manner these past few months doesn’t feel familiar and as much as Jack misses everything, he misses his best friend the most.

Maybe that’s why he pushes this time instead of ceding to the heavy quiet. “Samson, what’s wrong.”

Sam’s fork clatters loudly against his plate when he drops it. Jack jumps at the sudden loud noise, blue gaze widening ever so slightly.  “Stop--” The curt tone drops even heavier than the cutlery between them. “Just fucking stop asking me what’s wrong.” Sam’s gaze rises to meet his and Jack flinches at the anger he sees there, the frustration, the bitterness. Sam breathes out and picks up his fork again, muttering under his breath so quiet Jack almost doesn’t hear. “---I think I liked it better when you didn’t give a fuck.”  _ Almost. _

And that--- that hurts the most out of everything. “ _ What? _ ”

“ _ Stop _ acting like I’m about to break.” Sam bites off the words, fork viciously stabbed through layers of pasta as if the emphasis the point. “Because I’m  _ not _ .”

“I’m  _ trying _ to treat you the same but you’re not  _ letting _ me,” counters Jack, voice raising a touch and fingers gripping tighter on his knife. “I thought we were good; I thought we understood each other but I look at you and I don’t even know you sometimes.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean.”

“Since when were you the type to go out every night, Jack? Evander, lives a very interesting life.”

“Well, I’m  _ sorry _ for trying to find some fucking joy in this joyless season. At least I’m  _ trying _ to fix things here and fix this stupid ass team. You--- you said you wanted this, that you’d  _ try _ but you’re not fucking trying at all.” It slips out before Jack means it to and the silence that follows is horrific. “Sam--- I---”

“So you think I’m not trying?” It’s a flat response, the kind that makes Jack want to take back his words even more.

“That’s not what I sai--”

“That’s literally what you just said.”

“I didn’t mean—“

“But you said it anyway. You don’t just say things. They’re thoughts first. You think I’m just going through the motions? That I’m happy just to show up for a paycheck and mediocre hockey? Do I have to remind you that you already have your fucking contract and your fucking future nice and neat in front of you? I have nothing. Nothing right now but not enough points and bad luck.”

_ You have me. _ The words are there on Jack’s tongue, but he doesn’t say them because he knows as of late they might not be true anymore. “You don’t have bad luck,” he says instead, and it comes out far more scornful than he means ( or maybe exactly as much as he means in the moment ).

“Oh please --like you don’t magically have good luck out there. The good bounces. You’ve always been lucky, Jack.”

“Sometimes I don’t feel very lucky out there, but I go and do it anyway. And don’t you fucking mistake hard work for luck. Don’t you fucking dar--”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you can’t say that it doesn’t come easier to you. That it’s always been easy for---”

“Nothing about this has been easy. Nothing. You think I want to be the face of a franchise that just fails and fails and fails and fucking loses all the time? You think I wanted any of this?”

“I don’t know what you fucking want!” They’re both yelling now, food forgotten and bottled tempers finally boiling over. “All  _ I _ know _ ,”  _ continues Sam, hazel eyes darkened to flint, “is that I thought the one thing I could fucking bank on was having you but it doesn’t even fucking feel like that anymore. And maybe that’s stupid and selfish because it was never promised for more than these three fucking years but I thought that maybe---” Sam’s voice cracks and a heavy sort of silence descends on them instead, all wrong and dark in what should be the warmth of their kitchen.

_ Maybe I’d still have you.  _ Jack can hear the words unspoken in the air, the tension dropping with the weight of the unsaid.

“I’m going to bed,” says Sam finally, shoving his napkin and silverware over half-eaten lasagna. Jack watches him, at a loss for words, finding his voice only when the chair scraps back against the tile and Sam stands.

“Sam—Samson, please--”

“I said, I’m  _ going _ to bed.” Sam says again, steel hardening the tone of his voice as he walks from the kitchen without so much as a glance back.

…

It’s an off day the next day and Jack almost resents that: no hockey, no workouts, no nothing to take his mind off things and forget. Maybe that’s the problem these days: having memories that are either too long or too short.

_ Lunch? _

Evander’s text message buzzes his phone and Jack flicks the message away before tossing his phone aside altogether and sinking back into his pillow. It’s harder than it should be to resist the urge to scream into it.

Sam isn’t anywhere to be seen and Jack isn’t surprised. The second bedroom door had been tightly closed by the time he finished dinner and the dishes. Eyes closed, he thinks he can hear the low buzz of the TV and smell something like eggs cooking or possibly toast burning. For a moment the fact that he can’t tell the difference brings a smile to his face --memories of an exasperated Jake McCabe in a too small apron and hands on his hips surfacing easily-- but the feeling passes quick enough; their fight too fresh in his mind.

It’s hunger that finally drives him to push back the comforter and something like guilt in his stomach that get him to leave the bedroom and head slowly down the hallway. Sam is in the kitchen cutting an apple, looking up when a cracking floorboard beneath Jack’s foot betrays him.

It’s almost wrong when they make eye-contact, like the entire world stutters, unsure of how to continue on.

“Hey--” says Jack, and for a moment that follows, it’s all just the solid sound of the knife hitting the cutting board, one of the new anchors on WGRZ in the background talking about a chance of snow.

“Hey.”

It’s not much but it’s something, and it loosens the tightness in his chest just a bit enough to let him step into the kitchen, pull a mostly clean mug from the sink and pour himself coffee. Again, it’s just the clink of the spoon against ceramic mug, the drone of the news, sounds from hundreds of mornings before but not the same feeling as of late. He makes himself comfortable leaning back against the counter, shoulders slumped in as if that’ll do anything to make him look smaller.

“I’m sorry.” It’s Sam who speaks first, bringing Jack’s head up from where it’s been staring at the content of his cup. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that —but—“ Sam pauses, gaze directed at the ground, “This isn’t easy. Nothing’s been  _ easy  _ lately.”

“Hey, no—“ Jack’s voice is soft, the kind that the media likes to pretend he isn’t capable of. “I’m just as guilty here as you. I haven’t been here for you. I didn’t— didn’t—“

Sam laughs, a hollow cheerless sound. “You’ve had plenty to worry about— you may not have the C around here but everyone knows it’s yours someday.”

“That’s no excuse for-- for  _ this _ .” Jack counters, a desperate edge creeping into his voice. There’s this knot in his chest that’s been growing with every game, every missed pass and unread sign. They were something once and it feels like that’s been slipping away too much all too quickly --- and he doesn’t know how to force this emotion into words. “We were supposed to be a  _ team _ ,” he whispers finally. 

Silence creeps in as it has for too many conversations this season, Jack looking at Sam, Sam looking at the floor. Missed connections.

“Come here,” says Jack. “Please.” He glances at Sam’s face, swallows hard at what he sees there -- something like a caged animal, wanting to bolt but frozen in place anyway. Sam does move finally, too stiff and uncomfortable as he stands before Jack and he hates it with every fiber of his being.

But he reaches out in spite of it all, warmth hands taking Sam’s fingers in his. “Whatever this is, Samson, I want to fix it.”

“You can’t-- can’t fix everything, Jack.”

And maybe Sam has a point but Jack is tired of feeling helpless because how is he supposed to help his team when he can’t even help the one person on it he cares for the most?

“No.” It’s firm as he can make it, words like a promise and a grip on Sam’s hand like a lifeline, “Maybe not but we can-- we can fix this. I just-- I hate fighting with you, Samson. I hate not having you at my side. And--” Jack lets out a long breath, fingers toying with Sam’s, tracing between the knuckles and the back of his hand. “And it’s scary, sometimes. Looking at all this time and thinking about--”  _ About how you might not be there for it. _ He doesn’t say it; just another unspoken thought —there’s been too many of those lately.

“Yeah—” says Sam, fingers tightening over Jack’s stilling them. “Me too.”

Jack looks to find him already looking, something vulnerable in glistening hazel eyes. “I’m sorry,” whispers Jack, hands stilling as he links their fingers. “I should’ve been there for you.”

“You are now,” says Sam, almost breathless, “And I know that.” It’s an intimate response, barely murmured before he leans in to capture Jack’s lips, cutting off any more words.

...

Playing in the Winter Classic is a once in a lifetime kinda deal --unless you’re Jason Pominville who just so happened to also play in the first. But there’s this thrill in the air along with the frigid breezes and cold sun. It sends shivers up Jack’s spine that don’t have anything to do with the temperature. He’s always liked New Years, the way things seems brighter, more hopeful.

He pulls Sam into what he hopes is a secluded corner of Citi Fields’ many hallways and hauls him in close. “Hey-- I love you,” says Jack, blinking down at Sam. “Don’t ever forget that.”

Sam smiles back at him, leaning in until he’s barely an inch away, noses and foreheads brushing. “I know,” he whispers, and Jack pulls him in the rest of the way into a kiss. And with Sam under his frigid fingers and lips warm on his, this feels like something right, something firm to start the New Year off with.

“C’mon, lovebirds. Time for practice.” Caber’s voice carries to their corner, and Sam jerks back.

Jack catches his wrist before he gets too far though, pulling him back close until they’re almost nose to nose again. “Hey,” he says, voice as soft as the touch on the back of Sam’s neck, “the new year is coming; good as time as any to start again.”

“Yeah,” a small smile tugs at Sam’s mouth. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“I guess so,” echoes Jack, grinning in response.

* * *

_ And I could be wrong about anybody else _

_ So don't kid yourself  _

**Author's Note:**

> This took me fucking ages to write and I apologize. Arguments have never been my strong suit and I was struggling to try to pace and word things in a way that didn't really put either character at fault (and then I was lazy for about six months and couldn't be bothered to write 200 words worth of transitions until now). But thanks for reading and as always find me at [eichhart](http://eichhart.tumblr.com).


End file.
